Reporting Honestly

The sun was a shock as I walked out of one the four large buildings that perfectly matched the other 3 buildings in its cluster on the expansive corporate campus. With squinted, watering eyes, I walked briskly toward the bus stop while I simultaneously reached back to check my backpack's side pocket for my bus pass. The search was a little treacherous because the pocket was full of haphazardly placed mechanical pencils with the exposed lead side up. I silently criticized myself again for not putting them in there in a more orderly fashion, and for not being a more orderly person in general. The criticism wasn't in the form of words, it was more of a feeling of disapproval issued from myself to myself. Lately, my life had become, largely, trying to squeeze as much productivity as possible out of each and every minute. Wasting mental energy, even for just a second, on disheveled pencils that are in the way of knowing whether or not I had my backpack, felt enormously expensive.

While waiting at the street light at the end of the driveway preceding the campus's parking garage, I put the bus pass in my pocket and scanned the road ahead to see if the expected bus was visible yet. It wasn't. I noticed a seemingly 20-something Indian man, who, like me, was wearing his employee badge, and who was pacing, cell phone to his ear, head pressing forward and tilted down slightly. "Did you try restarting all the nodes simultaneously, rather than one at a time? We really need the data available in the UI again, asap!" He kept talking into the cell phone and pacing, asking questions, rubbing his forehead with his free hand. Being a software engineer, and having worked in IT for 20 years, I knew what it was like to be responsible for the functioning of some piece of software that isn't behaving expectedly. But, I just wanted some quiet and I was annoyed by both the noise and the anxiety he was emanating. Accordingly, I ignored him to the degree I could.

The bus arrived a few minutes later, likely no more than seven minutes later because that is how often the Rapid B line runs in busy-wealthy-high-tech-Belleuve. I climbed the three steps to board, swiped my bus pass (which was in the same holder as my employee badge) on the reader, and tried to make friendly eye contact with the bus driver because I had recently read that bus drivers can feel very isolated and lonely, and like no one really sees them. Since reading that, I had made a point of trying to make eye contact and say "hello" when I boarded a city bus, and "thank you" when I disembarked. Usually they didn't make eye contact or say anything in response, and that was the case on that particular day as well. Turning to my left down the isle between the columns of seats, I quickly scanned available seats, hoping for a window seat. I spotted an even better empty row, and sat in the seat by the window. The preference for a window seat wasn't so much about the window as it was about being at the outer most edge. The bus was already back in motion by the time I sat down. Not even bus drivers take their time in this busy region of the U.S.

My mind went back to a few years previous, when I first took the city bus on the Eastside of Seattle from home to work. At that time, I had been experiencing repeated bouts of anxiety during which I experienced the urge to move to some small town where no one knew me, assume a completely different identity, and not tell anyone. In these momentary compulsions, I would imagine myself working as a waitress in a diner, not developing any relationships, telling my customers, co-workers and bosses that my name was Jen or Nikki, living in a dumpy studio apartment with off-white, bare walls where I spent my free time reading. When I mentioned it to the therapist I'd seen off and on for ten years, she said, "that sounds awful". She meant that the life I described in my fantasy disappearance sounded awful. I thought she was likely right, but also, the comment seemed a bit besides the point because the important question seemed to be: Why was I feeling an inexplicable urge to disappear at all? For a split second after she said that, I wondered if she responded that way because the important thing to her in that moment was simply to focus on how awful it would be as a way to dissuade me from confused recklessness. Anyway, those urges to disappear myself stopped, and whenever I remembered them, I simply felt curious about what they were about in the first place.

My mind wandering to different times and places on the bus was common. In fact, the primary motivator for me to take the bus was to give my mind time and space to wander and perhaps give myself time to feel something. And while I did actually let my mind wander and sometimes I did feel things, and have an experience I referred to as "thawing out", the weight of responsibilities and perceived expectations often pressed in on me and I would not give myself that luxury.

On that particular day, for example, I remembered that I needed to schedule an oil change appointment for our car and that I also needed to place a grocery order through Instacart because we were running low on a few things. After an only moderately annoying experience with Honda's online maintenance scheduler, that task was complete, I was about to open the Instacart app but I got a Facebook notification. Thinking I had disabled those, I clicked anyway to see who was reaching out. It was my father-in-law, a man of very few words who seemed to try to keep a connection open with me exclusively through internet memes. Knowing the content he was sharing wasn't the point, I clicked the thumbs-up icon to indicate that I liked it without reading it and opened the Instacart app. The loading indicator, the circle going round and round. . . and round and round . . . while not unusual was still annoying. Waiting for things that should be easy/quick also felt like an almost infuriating waste of precious mental energy, especially when the point of the thing I was waiting for was to relieve some of the mental load I already had. I got through that taxing process and, feeling stuck on overdrive, proceeded back to Facebook for some mindless surfing rather than unplugging and thawing out.

The bus approached my stop, and I pulled on the cord to indicate I wanted to get off. As per usual, the bus driver respected the request, slowing to an eventual, screeching halt like they do. He looked, expressionless, in the rear-view mirror as the door opened. Wondering if eye contact was even possible from that distance through his rear-view mirror, I waved and said thank you. He didn't appear to gesture at all. I exited, turned right and walked for half a block down the traffic-dense NE 8th Ave, then pushed the cross walk button and waited. Hating the traffic noise, but loving the sun and a few minutes of freedom, my mind started wandering. I wondered how my daughter was doing in her computer programming class at Western Washington University. She had somewhat reluctantly agreed to take the class and now hated it.

Now a half a block away from NE 8th Ave, the relative quiet was welcome, and I turned left onto 7th PL, just past the "Kelsey Creek" sign. I felt pleasantly happy as I put one foot in front of the other on the black cement, lined by sidewalks bordered by cookie-cutter townhomes and strategically placed trees and shrubbery. As I got close to the townhouse we were renting, I noticed that the front door was open, screen door was closed, and I could smell what my husband was cooking. It was one of the meal delivery service meals we had been ordering for his dinners. They were delicious and saved us the hassle and time involved in finding recipes and going to the grocery store, but they were still more complicated than I was willing to deal with for my own dinners.

I pulled open the screen door, stepped over the threshold and said, "hey, Sweetie!" intentionally injecting some chipper into the tone. Michael walked the few steps it took to get from the stove to the front door. He looked tired or sad. Sometimes it was hard for me to tell the difference, and I usually read him as sad, which made me anxious. Usually, though, he said was tired, not sad. He was a mailman with an all walking route, so he walked, carrying heavy mail and packages all day, so it made sense that he would be tired, but I still had this fear that he was actually sad. "Hi, Sweetie" he said, reaching around to help me take my backpack off. We hugged for a while, like we always did. "How are you doing?" I asked, making eye contact. "Oh, alright," he said shrugging his shoulders and looking to the side like he often did. "Just a little tired." I could sense too that he was feeling some urgency about dinner prep -- chicken was cooking in the pan and these meals had surprisingly complicated instructions. "Sorry," I said sympathetically, caressing his shoulder. "It's OK," he said, "just don't worry that anything is wrong" he finished with a knowing, playful smile. "OK. Deal," I said, nodding my head, returning a playful look. I was too tired for anxiety anyway.

I went upstairs, changed into more comfortable clothes and by that I mean: yoga pants, sweatshirt, socks and, perhaps most importantly, no bra. After that, we completed dinner prep in our narrow kitchen, punctuated by end of the day small talk. "So, the meeting went well?" he said to me, and I to him: "How's your fantasy baseball team doing?" Things like that. He took his dinner and my salad to the table and asked if I wanted wine. I said I did. I took my iron and magnesium supplements. The iron was for chronic anemia and the magnesium was to reduce frequency of migraines.

Over the years, my dinner routine had become simpler and simpler and even still, there were so many itty bitty things that needed doing both before the actual dinner prep and during dinner prep. Michael's meals were from one meal delivery service and mine were from another and expressly for the purpose of portioning and putting on top of salad. They were pre-cooked, to keep it as simple as possible but still, it wasn't as simple as I wished: As soon as the meals arrived (they ship 4 meals in one box), I divide each meal into fourths, put each portion into a freezer bag, put them all in the freezer, rinsed the plastic dishes they came in, and recycled them. Then, each night, I cooked one of the servings and topped a salad with it. That night, like every night, I put salad mix in the bowl, added the salad toppings and dressing, put silverware on the table, salt and pepper on the table, lit the candle (because that improved that atmosphere greatly), wiped off the counter so the kitties wouldn't be temped, turned off the kitchen light so it wouldn't feel too bright, and got some water. These tasks usually felt inordinately burdensome to me, and I mean that I actually felt that the burden shouldn't be a burden. Why should something pleasant like getting dinner ready with the love of your life feel so heavy?

After all the prep was done, I approached the table. Michael pulled the chair I was about to sit in closer to him, as he often did. That always made me happy, and it also made it easier to get my legs between the leg of the table and the leg of the chair. We kissed before either of us took a bite, which is a tradition I started several years prior. We stick to these traditions mainly, I think, because they make me feel more secure in the relationships. Before he took a bite, he gave me a bite of his meal, which he always did because I was always curious what his meal tasted like. Then I started another task that I found taxing, despite the fact that it was something I'd been doing at dinner for 15 years: cutting up/mixing my salad. While I enjoyed salads -- and not being fat, which I had been in my younger years -- enough to eat them every night for dinner, I hated the entire process of making them, and I especially hated cutting/mixing them. It was another one of those tedious tasks that, partly because it always took place at the end of the work day, felt like it might be the one that makes the cup of too many tasks run over. Sitting there that night, I remembered the occasion when my daughter, watching me cut my salad from across the dinner table (as she had done for ten years), said "Do you ever think you might break a knife cutting your salads?"

End-of-work-day-conversation continued between me and Michael. "I made a joke in a meeting today at work and everyone cracked up," I said proudly and with a shade of timidity. Michael raised his eyebrows, turned to me with a feigned surprised and encouraging look, "Is that so?" "Yes!", I replied, "which is a surprise given that I'm not that funny." "You're funny" he said, supportively. "I'm not that funny," I persisted. "Well, you're funnier than you were when we met," he said, being a bit more specific and honest. "See, now you're just bragging," I replied with more intentional wit than I normally fork effort out for. He genuinely guffawed and said, "See? That was funny!" We continued eating at our black, stylish dining room table that was originally Michael's and that he had purchased from a landlord form whom he rented an apartment because, well, because it was in the kitchen of the place he was about to rent, he needed one, and he liked it. We always sat on the side of the table facing the sliding glass door leading out to the small deck, beyond which there were big green pine trees. In the right hand corner was a black shelf to hold the first Turkish lamp Michael had given me for a gift, and on the adjacent wall was a large replica of Van Gogh's Starry Nights.

The next morning, the 6 AM alarm from my android phone ushered in another day. My body felt heavy. Most mornings, I was shocked at how tired my body felt upon waking. Michael often woke up earlier than I did. He didn't wake up fully, and get out of bed or anything but more drifts in and out of sleep, enough that he was more awake than I was when I first woke up. Every morning, it was the same: I managed to sloppily dismiss my alarm after fumbling with my hands to find the phone on the end table. Then I would turn to my right, snuggling up to Michael with my shoulder cradled in his arm pit, left leg slung over his legs, and my left arm draped over his abdomen. He, with his awoken mind, would start analyzing something: maybe the show we watched the night before, commenting on contradictions, inconsistencies, or things he was curious about, or doing the same sort of thinking about recent conversations he'd had. I never had the energy to do more than utter single syllables in response, so the conversations never lasted long and he would often move on to simpler questions. On that morning, and many others, he asked if I had any dreams. I searched my memory to answer, and I found some vague images from a dream. Recalling them made me sad and I said I had dreamt but that I couldn't remember any details.

A few minutes later, I was in the kitchen, as usual at that time of day during the work week, getting Michael's breakfast ready, filling a thermos with coffee I brewed so he could drink it later and have a little pleasure and stimulation in his otherwise mostly boring and monotonous day of carrying mail. Before doing that, I fed the kitties.

Like the dinner-salad process and so many processes in my life, the work-day-morning process was the same every work day. My job demanded a lot and I had learned to conserve energy by automating things and minimizing the number of decisions I had to make. After I had started doing that out of necessity, I read it in article for tech workers about how to be more productive. The idea was: Conserve your executive function energy for work decisions and automate decisions about what to eat, how and where to exercise, what to do with the weekend hours during which you are not working (because of course you will be working for at least a few hours over the weekend). Anyway, at this point, I had been practicing it for years and I'd say I was damn good at it. But, while there were some advantages for productivity, I sometimes felt like I was a machine and that my life a system designed to optimize for best possible work performance. That seemed to be producing good career results but it wasn't uncommon for me to, when I did have a few minutes to relax, have this experience of feeling something I could never quite articulate. When I did try to articulate it to myself, I would describe it as feeling like the real me, or the core me, or the whole me was on the back burner of my life, or standing behind the work-optimized machine version of me.

There was one daily scheduled break in the system of processes. It was my 30-minute pre-work breakfast/coffee "quiet time". It worked like this: Michael would leave for work at 7 AM, backpack with lunch and a thermos full of coffee in hand. I would then happily put together a simple breakfast and prepare some coffee for myself. The house would be quiet and still, except for meandering cats. I would read articles, and let my mind wander wherever it wanted. It was a brief but essential lovely time to be with myself, not doing anything I needed to do or should do, not doing anything for anyone else.

On that particular morning, after "my time" was over, I was on to the next task which also had been routine for 15 years: the intense, 75 minute workout. I walked out the front door in my running gear turned left, and turned left again at the street that leads to the track I frequented. It was chilly, the area around the track was foggy, and there were the couple other regulars there. That was all typical. Approximately ten minutes into my run, my legs felt dead tired, which was also typical. (A couple of months later, I suffered an overuse injury that still hasn't completely healed.)

Keeping with keeping things typical, I was listening to an audio book while running around the brick-red colored track. I was still in the introduction of the book called Life in Code. I was curious and optimistic about the book because the author was a smart woman who had been a computer programmer back in the 80s and who, I had heard, had some real things to say about tech and life outside of code. The introduction written by Jared Lanier, and his words pulled me far away from typical. Here's what he wrote, and what I heard that morning, pushing myself through exhaustion which is what I spent most of my waking life doing: "The Internet can give you an illusion of omniscience, but you are in a mirror bubble. To get context, to see where you are, you must find a way out of the thing that sometimes seems to be everything. There are two ways to find your bearings. One way to approach the puzzle is to go back in time, as with understanding the origin of the word “computer.” There is another way, however, which is to go internal. Find the quiet to report honestly what you feel, to escape the iron force field of social expectation for just a moment. That’s amazingly hard to do. It can be helpful to read the words of someone else who has done it, and that’s one reason literature is so important. Rather than the mash-up of the social web, it’s the truth of the individual voice." I stopped running, pulled my phone out of the waist belt it had been in, pressed the pause button in the audible app, and stood there, breathing hard, breath made visible in the cold air, sweat dripping, thinking about quiet spaces, internal spaces, what I felt, and the idea of people reporting what they felt. Standing there thinking about his words, imagining what it would feel like to go internal, to report honestly report what I felt did not feel taxing, heavy, constraining, constricting or like any of the other feelings associated with feeling like a machine optimized for work performance. It felt like air.